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by Tossrock 3919 days ago
I'm kind of astonished to hear someone paid money for the e-cat. I'd always thought of Rossi as a crank. Hopefully I was wrong and we get a revolutionary new energy source, but I'm still not convinced.

General Fusion is still awesome though, and it's great to see they're making progress. I wish I were a rich VC because I would have bet on them 6 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8np70/fusion_dream...
1 comments
ChuckMcM 3919 days ago
That is because he is a crank. Anyone who actually has a working device would simply sell electricity at below market rates to earn the money to continue the development. And any system which cannot generate enough energy to pay for its cost of operation and generate at least some profit, is not a working system.

That said, since there is a whole of confusion about just what is going on around LENR type systems, it feels a lot like Sarnoff and Tesla arguing about Radio to me.

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marcosdumay 3919 days ago
Rossi is a crank, not arguing about that.

But have you ever calculated how expensive is to get any amount of heat-generated electricity into the grid? Even if one had a completely free source of heat, any generator that is not at least on the tens of MW isn't economicaly viable. And for tens of MW, one needs tens of millions of dollars.

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aminorex 3919 days ago
Rossi has sold 1MW heat plants.
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ChuckMcM 3919 days ago
Actually he has a plant "under test", he is self reporting it here: http://www.e-catworld.com/rossis-1mw-plant-performance-updat...

But with the caveat: This is of course not verified scientific data, but it’s about as good as we are going to get until the test is concluded and data published, and it might help paint something of a picture of how things are going with the plant.

Any plant that generates 1MW net power can earn $54,000 a month in revenue. A bit more than 1/2 million dollars a year. If it costs less than that per year to run, then he just has to wait for it to generate enough cash to build a second one, and then a third one. At which point he will become exponentially rich without anyone's help.

Except that isn't the way its working out. I wish him the best of luck but he seems to have this century's version of the Moeller Air Car.

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DougMerritt 3919 days ago
Wow, blast from the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar

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